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e-Procurement

The acquisition of direct and indirect products and services using the internet and new technologies to facilitate a seamless, end-to-end stream of strategic procurement activities by connecting buyers with suppliers.

The inclusion of tools and business intelligence systems that enable improved responsiveness and analysis within the procurement organization.

The linkages between suppliers and internal systems across the supply chain.

IBM Global Procurement Supplier Integration Strategy

The mission of IBM Global Procurement is to acquire goods and services efficiently and effectively for internal and external customers with the most competitive supply chain cost. This is done with an eye toward flexibility to react to changing market demands.

We fulfill our mission by using commodity councils to strategically source all goods and services and through the use of common processes across the global enterprise. This is conducted in an environment of pervasive e-Procurement across all steps of the acquisition process from initial market intelligence, strategic sourcing, tactical implementation, invoicing, and electronic payments. These e-Procurement processes are an integral part of an optimized end-to-end supply chain, which benefits our customers and suppliers. e-Procurement applications are based upon open public standards, are designed to enable B2B integration between IBM and its suppliers to reduce transaction and handling costs, and to enable automated timely information exchange.

Within the broad umbrella of B2B are Server-to-Browser (S2B) applications, such as Web Order Invoice, used to support purchase order and invoice transactions for our low transaction-volume suppliers, accessible through a web browser. Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) and RosettaNet (an XML implementation), which are our Server-to-Server (S2S) integration enablers, support a broad range of business processes used to connect IBM’s back-end applications to the suppliers’back-end applications to support high transaction-volume suppliers.